YAKUTAT, Alaska – Here’s one side of a phone conversation overheard the past week in the lounge and TV room at Leonard’s Landing Lodge:

“Honey, I didn’t get very many fish. And I’m coming home really sunburned.

“But I swear I really am in Alaska.”

Yep, a just-concluded weeklong fishing trip to the unseasonably dry north was like that: Warm (hot at times, actually), not a drop of rain, dust clouds behind vehicles reminiscent of a BLM road in eastern Oregon in August and hordes of small biting flies known notoriously as “white socks.”

The lack of water – locals said it rained 14 inches in August, then nothing - led to a dearth of salmon in the rivers that had the locals saying repeatedly, “those who know how to fish are getting fish. Those who don’t aren’t.”

During a week of arm-wearying casting and retrieving I hooked and lost about 10 fish and caught and landed five, just one of those a coho salmon.

I hooked a couple of salmon on the Italio River, but this was the only thing that I landed, an ...more

I hooked a couple of salmon on the Italio River, but this was the only thing that I landed, an inch-long krill. It was foul-hooked, though, so it had to be released.

Henry Miller / Special to the Statesman Journal

One salvation for the expense is that one of the other fish was a 50-pound halibut. On the flip side, I also foul-hooked a 3-inch pile perch that was trying to steal my bait.

In retrospect, one of the biggest upsides to the week was rehabilitating my reputation for futility as one of those who don’t and aren’t. That is now fully restored.

Fishing frustration led to a daylong sightseeing outing to a place nicknamed “the bridge to nowhere” over the Dangerous River. The road actually did go somewhere, dead-ending in a dirt parking lot for about a dozen vehicles on the far side of the bridge.

The pilings that support the bridge have steel, wedge-shaped ice guards at the base to deflect the sometimes massive icebergs that float downriver from Harlequin Lake about three-quarters of a mile upstream.

From the bridge, you can see the ice floes, most grounded, some floating, on the lake.

The sights and sounds that you experience if you make the short, relatively flat hike into Harlequin are amazing.

Chunks, blocks and slabs of ice calve off of the face of the Yakutat Glacier into the lake, sounding like reverberating rifle shots.

The four of us who hiked in – Rick, Tom Wasson, Mike Flood and me – were in awe.

Thanks for sharing, guys.

Bears at the beach. These tracks were about 15 feet from our fishing hole near the mouth of the ...more

Bears at the beach. These tracks were about 15 feet from our fishing hole near the mouth of the Italio River.

Henry Miller / Special to the Statesman Journal

Bear alert: There were a lot of them around.

The closest that I came was shooting a picture of a pile of fresh poo on a trail near the Situk River that was as large as my size 13 wader boot.

One smallish brown bear even wandered around near the Leonard’s Landing cabins, and one approached some members of our fishing party at the Italio River.

My lone sighting was a huge brown bear slow-walking across a highway seen through the van windshield coming back from the bridge to nowhere. It was about 200 yards in front of us.

But there were a lot of other critter sightings: A pair of whales, about a half dozen porpoises, two deer grazing on a front-lawn in downtown (if you can call it that) Yakutat and three sea otters, the largest of which looked about the size of a back-stroking Newfoundland dog paddling lazily upriver near the Ankau Bridge.

“Did anyone check the fish ropes?” Dick Wasson, Tom’s dad, asked about the three silver salmon on the stringers that were caught by the anglers in our party who know how and did after the otter had passed.

Not a worry for me.

“When it rains, the rivers are going to come up, and fishing will be fantastic,” Dick said.

A weeklong storm began soaking the area … three days after we left.

Henry Miller is a retired Statesman Journal outdoor columnist and outdoor writer. You can contact him via email at HenryMillerSJ@gmail.com